David Pogue of the NYT has been tirelessly bugging cell phone companies to reduce the irritating messages that you must listen to before you can leave your friend a voicemail. Today, he posted some interesting instructions:

And I’ll admire you if you’ll re-record your own voice mail greeting so that it includes instructions for bypassing the carrier’s own recording: “Hi, it’s David.

Theresa had a “cooking club” meeting at my house last week. She showed us how to eat Polish Borscht (I say that because she prepared it that day before). And she showed us how to cook Gołąbki. Both were delicious.

I’ve also posted one of my favorite The Pump Energy Food recipes, the Dionysus Plate. It’s light, fresh, and full of protein for you muscularnes out there.

Here’s what I do today. Mostly I’m running XBMC on Linux on a computer under the TV. I get TV shows via bittorrent — mostly documentaries from PBS. I also boot into Windows 7 so that I can watch streaming Netflix via Windows Media Center (which is built in to Win7). Unfortunately, I hate the music interface to WMC, so I use 2 programs.

I just tried the (closed) Boxee beta today. Someone figured out how to download the beta and posted it to bittorrent (see [1] below). Running on Win7, it searches all the various places to get media (such as Hulu.com and Netflix).

I run my own mailserver, for better or for worse, and I use SpamAssassin to catch spam. For years I have been tucking it away in a folder. Guess how much was there? Give up? Nine gigabytes! Thanks, spammers!

Curious thing some of you may run into. I tried to plug a Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 linux machine into my router running Tomato 1.27, but it failed. Turns out you need to disable IPv6, since Tomato does not support it.

I’m writing a book, so fussy things like getting references to appear right in the text have been occupying my time unexpectedly. I use the LyX document processor, which I really enjoy for writing long documents like my thesis and this book.

Here’s how to get nice reference to appear in the text like this (Smith, 1995).

My extensive research into the subject (i.e., googling for 30 seconds) has revealed that there are two free PDF readers (Win/Mac) that will let you add comments to PDF documents. I’ve tested them, and those comments can be seen when you open it up in other readers, like Adobe’s free reader.